15 November 2015

Britain 1818

My recently released novella, Incident in Berkeley Square, takes place in late April 1818. The nxt full length novel in my Malcolm and Suzanne Rannoch series, London Gambit, which will be out in May 2016, takes place in June of 1818. In both stories, danger and intrigue find their way into the secure Mayfair world where Malcolm and Suzanne have found a haven after the Napoleonic Wars. Beyond their jewel box of a house and leafy plane trees of the Berkeley Square garden,
Britain is not a very settled place either.

Waterloo is only three years in the past. Napoleon has been
defeated and exiled to the tiny island of St. Helena, but the ruling
powers from Whitehall to Paris to Moscow still fear he could escape. In
France, a restored Bourbon King is on the throne, and the “Ultra
Royalist” faction is eager exact revenge for
everything since the Revolution. Their zeal has brought about the “White Terror” in
which scores of former Bonpartists have been imprisoned and executed. In
this fevered atmosphere, political games are played for life and death
stakes and personal loyalty is an ephemeral thing. The Come de Flahaut, a
real historical figure who plays an important role in Incident in Berkeley Square and returns in London Gambit,
is fortunate to have escaped France. Flahaut was an officer in Napoleon’s
army and the lover of the Empress Josephine’s daughter, Hortense. He is
also the illegitimate son of Talleyrand, Napoleon’s wily one-time
Foreign Minister (a mentor of Malcom Rannoch's who has also appeared in the series.
Talleyrand has managed to survive under the Bourbons and helped protect
Flahaut. Flahaut has sought refuge in Britain and married the Scottish
heiress Margaret Mercer Elphinstone in the teeth of her father's objections. His former lover Hortense Bonaparte is also exiled from France,
living in Switzerland with her two young sons. Hortense and the
Bonaparte family have past ties to Suzanne Rannoch.

While the British Government still worries about Bonapartist plots,
the situation in Britain itself is far form easy. The Napoleonic Wars left Britain badly in debt. With the end of the
war, the British Government is no longer pouring money into munitions
and supplies for the Army. Without Government contracts, the textile
mills that made uniforms and the iron foundries that made cannon have
cut back on workers (and changes in manufacturing had already made jobs
scarce). At the same time, former soldiers are flooding the job market.
Work is scarce and the price of food is exorbitant. With the Government
no longer buying food for the Army and foreign grain markets opening up,
the price of corn (wheat) dropped. But Parliament used the Corn Laws to
protect the price of homegrown corn. This also protected the profits of
the landowners who grew the corn (and who had already benefited greatly
from the high corn prices during the war). But the unemployed factory
worker or the discharged soldier returning from the Continent (possibly
less than whole), faced high prices as well as dwindling income. Yet
though the conditions are bleak in Britain ‘s industrial towns, the
rural poor keep leaving the countryside and pouring into the cities.

The Tory government (Lord Liverpool the Prime Minister, Lord Sidmouth
the Home Secretary, Lord Castlereagh the Foreign Secretary, among
others) have a pervasive fear of violent revolution at home. (Echoes of
the French Revolution reverberate through the politics of the day). At
the same time, the Government Ministers fear Parliamentary reform and
see repression rather than any sort of reform as the best way of
preserving the world as they know it.

In 1817 a crowd
surrounded the Prince Regent’s carriage as he drove to open Parliament.
Someone threw rocks at him or possibly fired an airgun. As J.B.
Priestley writes in The Prince of Pleasure, “The Regent may or
may not have felt panic-stricken–if there is evidence either way, I have
not found it–but Lord Liverpool’s government soon behaved as if there
had been barricades in St James’s Street and the rattle of musketry
along Piccadilly. They may have been genuinely alarmed or they may have
seized upon a good excuse to be repressive, but what is certain is that
they rushed through a number of deplorable measures, which could hardly
have been worse if half the towns in England had been in flames.”

Habeas Corpus was suspended. Based on an act from the days of Edward
III, magistrates were given the power to imprison anyone they thought
likely to behave in a way that threatened public order (a wide
definition, which could end in someone being thrown in prison for making
a face at a person of higher social status). Protesting any of this in
person or in writing was made difficult by acts against Seditious Libel
and an act that prohibited meetings of more than fifty within a mile of
Parliament at Westminster Hall.

While the Government feared revolution, they recognized that events
such as the mob surrounding the Prince Regent helped pave the way for
repressive measures. They also realized that revolutionary talk, violent
acts, and rioting were an effective way to separate moderate radicals
and reform-minded Whigs from their more extreme fellows. With this end in mind, the Government, particularly Lord
Sidmouth, employed agents provocateurs, who infiltrated radical groups and not only reported back to Westminster but actually incited violent action.

Though Malcolm and Suzanne's lives are seemingly more settled after the war, their story now unfolds against this backdrop, in a city
seething with suppressed unrest, teetering on a knife edge between
reaction and reform. At heart Suzanne, a former Bonapartist agent, is
still a revolutionary (and now free to voice her opinions to her
husband) while Malcolm, however reform-minded, is still a member of the
aristocracy. Which means that though they may have battlefields and council chambers of the Continent for the ballrooms and alleys of London, there is still plenty of intrigue in their lives.

2 Comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you for this excellent explanation of the state of England in 1818. Often we are so focussed on Waterloo that we assume that defeating Napoleon meant all was well, whereas in fact England did not adapt well to peace.